Citations Needed
Nima: On Twitter and through his columns, high status pundit Nate Silver has made a career reporting on the polls and insisting he's just a dispassionate conduit of the Cold Hard Facts — registered trademark. Like Joseph Smith or the prophet Muhammad he's just channeling the holy word of — what else? — "data." Silver is not really interested in expressing any kind of ideology he insists, only doing what he calls "empirical journalism." Through this schtick however, a lot ideology winds up being advanced, unsurprisingly an ideology that reflects Silver's own self-admitted "libertarian, liberal" bent.
Adam: To pull this off Silver has perfected what one Twitter account, @InternetHippo, refers to as "Pundit Brain", whereby one forgoes fighting for things and rests on simply describing the world in a reductionist and oftentimes bleek manner. The main feature of Pundit Brain — something we've talked about on the show a lot which we call The Normative-Descriptive Shuffle — which is a rhetorical trick used effectively by Silver whereby conversations about values and policy and what is good in society are, without the reader really noticing, shifted to discussions about quote "just the way things are" in a world-weary savvy manner.
Nima: In this view, nothing is really worth fighting for on first principles, politicians should simply listen to the polls and adopt policies that reflect what is generally popular and uncontroversial. The goal of this particular rhetorical trick, and the spread of Pundit Brain in general, is inherently reactionary. By prioritizing a description of the world, rather than attempts to change it, politics becomes a pseudoscience, a sport to be gamed rather than a mechanism for improving people's lives.
Adam: The spread of Pundit Brain has trickled down into liberal discourse more generally. Now, we are all some version of Nate Silver. Average political media consumers watch polls religiously, try to figure out who is quote unquote "electable" and what ideas are quote unquote "possible." In lieu of advancing a candidate or agenda they believe in, voters themselves have become mini-pundits, not arguing for a better world, but trying to figure how best to quote unquote "win."
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Another good episode from Citations Needed. It's a critique of the horse race we see when it comes to electoral politics, we are just spectators of the race instead of actually participating in it and affecting change. They also speak about what they call the Normative-Descriptive Shuffle in which people will shift the conversation away from how we can make things better to "that's just how things are." The best example I see is when people say that Biden is terrible and shit, someone will chime in to say that Biden is leading in the polls as if it refuted the terribleness of Biden.
Give it a listen
